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(AP Photo/Evan Vucci) Donald Trump and Melania Trump arrive for a New Year's Eve party at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on December 31, 2017. W hen the history of America’s final days as a republic is written, it may be fairly said that a hostile foreign power helped elect an authoritarian president with no agenda other than plunder, that the majority of America’s white people took the plunderer’s racist, misogynist bait—and that the Congress of the United States helped him loot the public commons and cover up his likely crimes. And that’s just the CliffsNotes version. As the president sets about destroying the nation’s public institutions, Congress is launching investigations of the president’s investigators: the FBI, career Justice Department employees, and the special counsel appointed to investigate the president’s ties to Russian government agents during the 2016 presidential election. The Republican Congress, it seems, would rather investigate the president’s electoral...

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin House Speaker Paul Ryan leaves the House Chamber after voting on the Republican tax bill W ith the passage of the Republican tax bill, there’s no longer room for doubt: The big heist is on. The looting of the national commons is well underway, and now those behind it feel no need to hide it. Let’s face it—this is why they allowed President Donald J. Trump to happen. He may not have been the first pick of GOP leaders, who would have preferred a more subtle approach, something that looked more like the invisible hand of the market than outright pillage. But once Trump had the nomination locked up, they fell in line. However ugly things might get, a bonanza awaited the crowd that carried Trump across the White House threshold. You’ve likely heard by now that 83 percent of the gains to taxpayers in the bill go to the top 1 percent, ranked by income. How the tax cuts for middle-income earners are modest and temporary, while the cuts for corporations are robust and...

(Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images) Supporters of Doug Jones celebrate at the Sheraton in Birmingham, Alabama, on December 12, 2017. H ell hath no fury like a predator scorned. And so it was that Roy Moore, the far-right Republican U.S. Senate candidate who Tuesday night lost a special election in Alabama to Democrat Doug Jones, refused to concede to his rival that evening, even after all the major news outlets called the outcome. On the same day, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to insult a high-profile woman senator with sexual innuendo. As Paul Waldman noted , Trump all but shouted, “Whore!” Moore and Trump, on the surface, have little in common, Trump being an areligious, foul-mouthed New Yorker, and Moore being a performatively pious Southerner. But they are bonded by an experience they share: a chorus of female voices aimed at them, the voices of women with credible stories of having been groped, forcibly kissed, stalked, and more. In Moore’s case, the women...

AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster Representative Trent Franks takes his seat before the start of a House Judiciary hearing on Capitol Hill C all me Roy Rogers; for the last year and a half I’ve been riding a horse named Trigger . I’m hardly what you’d call a snowflake. I’ve been around this block a few times, by virtue of being female and on the earth for a while. But the torrent of revelations of sexual assault and harassment by men in high places has led countless women like me—women who have experienced one or both of those transgressions—into a prolonged state of hypervigilance, as the world learned of a range of techniques and degrees for the sexual subjugation of women in the workplace, be it an ass-grab, a masturbation display, or an all-out assault. If you’ve been subjected to anything like this yourself, you’re now reliving it every damn day. But here’s one I hadn’t counted on: the boss asking his employee if she’d like to have his baby. That’s what Representative Trent Franks, who...

(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) Today co-anchor Matt Lauer appears before the NBC Commander-in-Chief Forum on September 7, 2016. U ntil this morning, Today show anchor Matt Lauer was one of the highest-paid people in television, with an estimated annual salary north of $20 million . Today, he’s out of a job because of, in the words of NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack , “ inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace. ” While we’ve yet to learn of just what kind of “ inappropriate sexual behavior” Lauer stands accused, we do know that he’s a sexist jerk who imperiled the nation because of his sexism. Because when you’re one of the highest-paid people in television news, you really can imperil the nation through your biases. Lauer was one among a group of mighty newsmen who, during the 2016 presidential campaign, sought to paint Hillary Clinton as duplicitous and deceptive—charges reserved for women since that time the men who wrote the Bible invented Eve. Others include Mark Halperin and Glenn...